Last month I published When to Sell Your Business in the AI Era. The conclusion was blunt. Sell now, before the market understands what AI and robotics are going to do to your industry, while buyers are still paying a multiple built on the old world.
I've spent the weeks since talking with business owners about it. Almost none of the pushback was about the argument. It was about something else entirely.
"I love this. I love the industry. I like my customers. I like who we help. I'm not trying to go sit on a beach."
So let me say the thing I don't think I said well the first time.
I'm not telling you to leave the work. I'm telling you to leave the company.
What's changing
I watch this stuff weekly, and the biggest shift I've seen isn't the models getting smarter at answering questions. It's that they left the chat window.
AI is now taking over my computer and running the workflows I used to run myself. Not telling me how to do the work. Opening the applications and doing it.
Two days ago OpenAI announced GPT-6 Astra, a model built specifically to operate a computer, and it starts reaching customers this week. Greg Brockman, their president, says it can zip through spreadsheets, fill out forms, and navigate web pages at superhuman speed.
Your business happens on a computer. That should make you very fearful.
You are not going to turn the ship
The obvious response is that you'll adapt. Bring AI into the business, rebuild the processes, retrain the team, come out the other side still standing.
There is one version of that which works, and I've written about it. Founder mode. Back in the chair, cutting hard, betting the company, willing to lose 70% of your team and a majority of revenue to save the rest.
It can be done. It almost never is. And in the businesses I've worked with, the thing standing in the way isn't the owner's willpower. It's the company itself.
Clay Christensen named this a long time ago. The Innovator's Dilemma is full of companies that saw exactly what was coming, had every intention of adapting, and still couldn't do it. Not because the leaders were stupid. Because everything that made the company good at the old model resisted the new one.
Which brings me to the guy who proves it.
Barrett had every advantage and still couldn't do it
Barrett Ersek, who I wrote about in The Disruption Formula, ran a $2 million lawn care company with about twenty employees. In 1998 he worked out how to kill the worst part of his industry. Quotes took three weeks and only 20% of them converted. Using aerial photography, he could measure a lawn remotely and quote it over the phone while the customer was still on the line.
He pitched it to his team. They shut it down. Every single one of them told him it wouldn't work.
They weren't wrong to fight it, either. It changed how they worked, how they were measured, and how they got paid. Twenty people whose whole job was driving out and measuring lawns were being told that job was going away. Employees don't want change. The status quo is good for them.
Now think about what Barrett had going for him. He owned the company. He founded it. He had total authority, a proven idea, and he was the most motivated person in the building.
He still couldn't get it through.
And notice where his innovation came from. Inside. He thought of it, he wanted it, he controlled the company, and it died anyway.
AI and robotics are not coming from inside your company. They are coming at it. Nobody in your building thought of it. Nobody in your building wants it. It threatens how they work, how they're measured, and how they get paid, and they know it.
If Barrett couldn't push through an idea he owned and invented, you are not going to push through one that showed up from outside and threatens everyone in the room.
So Barrett sold that company to TruGreen. His non-compete was geographic, so he moved one town over and built a new company from the ground up around the innovation his old one wouldn't adopt. He opened Happy Lawn of America in 2004.
His first company took six years to reach $2 million. Happy Lawn, built around the innovation his old team rejected, did it in seven months.
Same guy. Same industry. Same idea. He just changed the building.
Sell it, then build it again
Here's what I'm actually telling business owners who love the work.
Sell at today's valuation, and do not wait, because waiting costs you. Right now buyers are still pricing off historical cash flows and still reading your headcount as an asset instead of a liability. That number is the highest it is ever going to be, because it's priced on a version of your industry that is about to stop existing.
Then start the same business again. Same industry, same customers eventually, same twenty years of knowing exactly where the money is. Except this time you build it around AI and robotics from day one, and there is nobody to convince, nothing to unwind, and no department defending itself in every meeting.
You get to be nimble in an industry where nimble is about to be the only thing that matters.
Because somebody is going to build that company. Whoever it is won't have a twenty-year-old company to drag along behind them, and if the Innovator's Dilemma and a century of case studies tell us anything, that's the one who wins.
Barrett wasn't finished with lawn care. He loved it enough to spend another decade in it. He just understood something most owners don't figure out until it's too late.
The company was never the point. The work was.